Steam City Pirates

by Jim Musgrave

  I thought back to that day. I was standing, wet and hungry, inside Mister Poe’s doorway. Poe was not a rich man. In fact, he was existing on a brief cloud of fame brought to him by his writing of the famous poem, “The Raven,” and he was spending all his waking moments trying to acquire some magic formula to save his dying young bride, Elizabeth, his beloved Sis. He saw me standing there, my pale face looking at him for some kind of answer, and he suddenly turned and dashed back into the bedroom.

  When Poe returned, he held in his hands a paper, which he proceeded to read to me, with no explanation, with no preface, and with no afterward. The words alone were, to him, enough said. These same words came to me later because I had remembered them—all of them—all these years following that day. I had used them on the battlefield, when I thought I would be the next to catch a bullet in the brain, or when I was so alone and frightened before another coming battle that I believed Satan himself was orchestrating my life. I spoke these words into the foggy mist of that dark catacomb:

  Take this kiss upon the brow!

  And, in parting from you now,

  Thus much let me avow-

  You are not wrong, who deem

  That my days have been a dream;

  Yet if hope has flown away

  In a night, or in a day,

  In a vision, or in none,

  Is it therefore the less gone?

  All that we see or seem

  Is but a dream within a dream.

  I stand amid the roar

  Of a surf-tormented shore,

  And I hold within my hand

  Grains of the golden sand-

  How few! yet how they creep

  Through my fingers to the deep,

  While I weep- while I weep!

  O God! can I not grasp

  Them with a tighter clasp?

  O God! can I not save

  One from the pitiless wave?

  Is all that we see or seem

  But a dream within a dream?

  After I spoke these words, my mother figure, the dreamer, opened her eyes and stared at me, fixedly, as if I were the one who was now dreaming. “What are you saying? Are you saying these puzzles were all meant for me alone to solve?” I asked.

  The Italian-American ambassador began to dance in circles with her tiny Roman soldier. “Yes! Now you have it, Detective O’Malley! The dreamer creates your difficulties. She is your nemesis. As you attempt to solve the dilemmas we place before you, she will devise another false clue, another dead end, and you must find your way out of her mazes in order to move on to the next level. Don’t you see? Poe was right! Each one of us creates our own reality, yet only those amongst us who are wise enough to find the true source of pain and struggle are allowed to change dimensions and battle for the highest reward of all.”

  “The highest reward? What are you saying?” I could not take my gaze from my mother’s eyes. It was if she alone could allow me to go on playing this puzzle game.

  “The reward is discovering who the Master Dreamer is, of course! He is the one we worship. He is the one who has created all of this we see in the multiverse dimensions. If you can solve the little puzzles leading to the Master Dreamer, you will have approached the Ultimate Science.”

  My mind watched her through my eyes, and as she, my dreamer, my dead mother, began to close her eyes, my eyes also began to close. Slowly, drip by drip, sin by sin, desire by desire, I became unconscious to this reality.

  * * *

  Outside, in front of the Italianate mansion, Bessie was beside me. I looked over at her. “What can we do now?” I asked, my voice trembling.

  “I’ll get some money from the bank, and we shall continue the charade. We can learn about the science of this charlatan next week,” she said.

  I looked at her aghast. “Did you not see what just happened down in that pit of demonic subterfuge? My mother was the dreamer. I read the lines from Poe’s poetry. She told me it’s all a puzzle for me alone to solve.”

  Bessie stopped walking, took hold of my chin, and stared up at me. “Patrick, are you feeling well? Would you like to see Doctor Jacobi? I know he’s on duty today at Mount Sinai,” she said.

  I knew at that moment that I was the only one who had experienced the illusion or delusion down in the tabernacle. Perhaps I was out of my mind. What was insanity? To what truth does one refer when one’s complete reality becomes utterly clouded?

  * * *

  Later, back inside Temple Emanu-El, I told the group what had happened inside the mansion of the World Scientific Advancement Society for Progress. They all stared at me for some time. Doctor Adler rubbed his shaved chin. Walter shook his head from side-to-side. Becky walked over to stand behind my chair and massage my shoulders. Bessie, bless her, did not tell them that she had not seen anything. I knew she would have to tell them, but at least she was holding back the truth to give me a chance to explain myself.

  “This dreamer could be their attempt to make you question your own thinking. The mind has ways of tricking our senses so we question what we think we know. By telling you about this game to find the Master Dreamer, they can lead you away from the truth and into their chicanery and illusions,” said Doctor Adler.

  “I could see my mother. Although it was all without color inside that room, she was truly there. I was told she was my nemesis. She was the one who creates the blind alleys and false clues that I experience in all my cases. What if it were true? What if all of you are creations of her dream? Poe’s poem said it. A dream within a dream,” I said, brushing my head against Becky’s soothing hand.

  Becky took her hand away. “I am very hurt, Patrick James, that you would call me and my love for you a product of a dream. My body is real, and my love for you is real. How can you say that it is not?”

  “Me thinks yer slippin’ over the edge, O’Malley. We need a strong man who can think straight right now,” said McKenzie.

  Bessie decided it was time to tell them what she had experienced. She moved over to stand in front of me. Her face looked serious as when she worked as a hospital administrator. “Our ruse went well. We are returning to the mansion to give this Dusteby woman a payment to purchase a share in their inventions. In return, we are to receive medical information about how she is allegedly able to exist with a steam-powered pair of lungs inside her rib cage. I certainly have my doubts, and this may prove advantageous to us. As for Detective O’Malley’s experiences in this dungeon of his. Well, the only event that occurred was when the little butler informed the Vicereine that he had found the door to what he called the ‘Tabernacle’ unlocked. That was all. We were escorted out of the mansion to eventually return here.” She looked back at me and frowned. “I am sorry, Patrick, but they have to know the real truth.”

  “Daughter of Lilith! You are not on the same plane as this man! I was there, and I saw it all happen just as he described it!” Seth Mergenthaler, the mazikeen, appeared, small hands on his thin waist, admonishing his mother.

  “How could you see and not your mother?” I asked him.

  “My spiritual half is privy to transcendent matters. Mother is all earth, like you. She is destined to live many more lives to come. She is trapped on the wheel that the Buddhists call ‘Samsara.’ I heard what they told you, Mister O’Malley. I was invisible inside the pit of your dreamer. She was there inside the cage on a hill of human skulls! It is quite an adventure, is it not?” Seth did a little jig in place, raising his feet and skipping as well as any Irishman.

  “Adventure can be both a blessing and curse, I would say,” I told him.

  “All right, Patrick James. You have a corroborator here, but how does what you experienced change our tactics? We still have to stop this group from sinking ships in the harbor. We still have to discover where they do their dirty work. You have only found a place where your dreamer exists,” said Becky. “You don’t even know what she really does when she dreams.”

  “I know,” I said, a bit frustrated with it al
l. “But what if this is leading me to a confrontation with this Master Dreamer? When I remembered Poe’s poem, I felt as if my life took a different turn. Becky, you always taught me to trust my insights. This event was the most insightful and most frightening experience I have ever had. And yet, you believe I should just cast it aside.”

  “I never said to cast it aside. Everything we do must be applied to the immediate task at hand. We need evidence to show us how these pirates can develop a device to blow-up ships. All this other information about midgets, dreamers, steam-powered inventions and Italian women needs to be held in abeyance unless we can relate it to the primary goal,” Becky explained.

  “What you say is true, up to a point, but this mystery is exactly the way she described it to me in their catacomb. We are being given false leads, and whether they come from an inventor employed by a nefarious underworld demon or from a dreamer sitting on skulls who looks like my mother, I must face the same task. This was the meaning behind Poe’s poem. ‘Yet if hope has flown away, in a night, or in a day, in a vision, or in none, is it therefore the less gone?’ We cannot lose hope because of the obstacles placed before us. It matters not how hope is stolen. Once it is gone, we are left without a higher purpose,” I said. I was quite confused from what had happened, and my mind was searching for meaning. I knew that if I didn’t grab onto something real my mind could float away.

  “I am also a dreamer,” said Seth, matter-of-factly, and we all turned to look at him. His eyes had that focused look I had seen before, and I knew he was seeing his telescopic vision into a future we were not allowed to see, unless I were to hop into my time machine and travel to it.

  Therefore, we waited for him to complete his dream, and we all knew we were part of it because all of us were on the path to becoming half an angel, or maybe even an entire one, as long as our cause was just and noble. Seth’s young brow rose in astonishment. His face grew red with either anger or fear, and he flew up into the air from the experience of what he saw.

  “What did you see, boy?” I asked when he came back down.

  “I saw the place where you will meet the Master Dreamer. I don’t know how far into the future it is, but I do know it is not a location in this city. The Master Dreamer was talking to you, explaining how he dreamed. He said his mind could expand to encompass the entire universe, and this was just one universe. There were other universes floating around in his mind, like soap bubbles, ready to be entered of his own free will. This is what I saw inside his mind: the tapestry of his mental photos showed visions from all over the universe, not just the earth’s space and time. There were depictions of frozen moments that were like visions of lucid dreams. One shot was a territory with floating islands in the clouds, whereupon thousands of robotic beings marched, collecting bundles of what looked like plasma inside their mandibles. Another visualization came from a world where walls rose up from the land, and between the walls there were thousands of insects riding mechanical vehicles, to and fro between them, as they were obviously the dominant species in this section of the cosmos. Only two dreams were from a recognizable place and time on Earth. One showed a town square in Europe, possibly in the sixteenth or seventeenth century, with carriages and horses, women in flowing gowns parading down the avenues, men in top hats, smoking huge pipes, collected together as they discussed something inside a tavern. Another scene was possibly from the 1950s, as there were adolescent girls wearing skirts with pictures of dogs sewn upon them, and hair was arranged like the hives of bees, laughing and dancing to devices poised at their ears. Behind them, standing on the corner, were boys with slick black hair and pompadours hanging over their foreheads, like symbols of their carefree lives.”

  “What does this all mean?” I asked.

  “He then told you that you must defeat him in battle as you both race through these different universes in your time machines. You shall both have the same weapon, a device that would stop a human’s spiritual advancement so that this person is sent back to the exact moment when the first Homo erectus raises himself from his knuckles and begins to walk with pride. The loser of your battle will become that first human! You will never see the advances of science or the miracles of medicine. You will never see a single dream of your own imagination come true. You will be back to the beginning as the first thinking man who sees his own form in the reflection of the light upon water and asks himself, ‘Why am I here?’”

  “And what does the winner receive?” Becky asked.

  “I wasn’t shown that part,” said Seth, and he cast his eyes down. “I only see what they give me,” he added.

  “I can now see that my future has even more excitement in it than my mother could ever dream. I just hope we can solve our present puzzle, so I can live to meet this Master Dreamer,” I said.

  Bessie spoke a line from Poe’s poem, “O God! Can I not grasp them with a tighter clasp? Patrick, you must use your reason before you attempt to visit the sand on the beach. Go to bed and dream like a normal man.”

  “No, Bessie. I shall never dream the same way again,” I said, and we all turned in for the night.

  Chapter 7: Wherein Our Tale Reaches an Exciting Movement onto the Next Level

  The months continued in 1868, until it was soon November. We had not returned to the Italianate mansion on Fifth Avenue, despite the experience I had with the tabernacle dreamer. We were determined to rely upon our little mazikeen’s ability to see into the future and tell us what lie ahead. Why did I believe in this boy’s predictions rather than common sense or the collected wisdom of my friends? Was it simply because Seth was the only person to verify my experience in that house? This was partly the reason. However, it was his prophesy that I would go to the next level to meet this “Master Dreamer” that made me focus upon a different course of investigation.

  I discussed this fact at length with Doctor Adler one night when we had no clues to go on, and all we were seeing around New York was the gradual increase in steam-powered inventions. We often discussed the reality of this growing organization’s reach into the community. Frankly, the development of their industries and the sale of their inventions were bringing a new optimism to our citizens. New Yorkers were able to transport themselves much faster around town, their homes were being heated by the miles of pipes being constructed throughout the buildings, and there was not a single instance of a weapon being used or a threat being given once to any person by the Society or its members.

  I spoke to the rabbi over a Thanksgiving dinner we were celebrating inside our sanctuary in the bottom of the temple. Ever since I was the one who was singled out by the Vicereine of the World Scientific Advancement Society for Progress my presence inside the Emanu-El basement was required, but I told the others in our group they need not stay there. Doctor Adler was sympathetic to my plight, and he was sharing some of the meal he had shared with his congregants.

  “Why should I believe in Seth, Doctor? His visions are the most fantastic and alarming events I have ever heard described. Could it be he is cursed in some way with this ability?”

  “Mister O’Malley, our scriptures tell stories about reluctant heroes who are called upon to do something important. They resist this calling at first, as it seems fantastical and impossible to them, just as your pursuit of this Master Dreamer seems unreal and unfathomable to you. Jonah was called to go to Nineveh to preach to the city so it would not be destroyed, but he refused at first and was thrown overboard at sea and swallowed by a giant fish. This was Jonah’s sheol. This word in Hebrew means ‘grave, pit or other abode of the dead’. You were in your sheol inside the Society’s tabernacle. This was why Missus Mergenthaler was unable to see you. It is your calling to accomplish greater things,” Doctor Adler said, picking up a forkful of potato kugel and putting it into his mouth.

  “All right. Seth is my angel, and I can understand that fact. In my religion, we believe each of us is appointed a guardian spirit to assist us. Except Seth is not a complete angel. He is only half
. He can die, just as I can die. We are not biblical characters, rabbi. We are flesh and blood. Therefore, when Seth tells me his interpretations of his visions, how do I know if he is telling me from his angelic or perfect point of view or from his human or imperfect point of view?” I wanted to know this because the decisions we would make could hinge upon whether or not Seth’s vision was correct.

  “The only perfect vision for humanity is hindsight. Decisions made in the present are always subject to error. The Creator of all universes knows everything and is infallible. Even His angels are subject to his commands. Since we have a very limited perspective, we need to always proceed with caution and ask for guidance,” Doctor Adler pointed out.

  “Why did you get involved with the Mergenthaler family in the first place?” I was meaning to ask that question for some time. This was a good opportunity to do so.

  “When this family came to America, I got to know them right away. Arthur Mergenthaler was a genius, but it was his insistence that he and his son were mazikeen that provoked my interest. I had never seen one of these entities in the flesh, but I have always kept an open mind when it comes to spiritual matters. I was also called to the rabbinical service. I did not go willingly, as my father was an atheist. We never followed any of the dietary laws of kashrut or kept any of the holidays—even on the high holy days of Passover and Yom Kippur. My calling came in Germany. I was walking past the village synagogue one day, and I heard a voice begging me to enter. I believed right away that it was the voice of my Maker, so I entered. There was a very old rabbi who was the teacher there, and he told me, ‘I have been waiting for you to come to replace me,’ and thus I began my training. My spiritual love grew so much that I decided to open the temple to those who did not strictly follow the laws. In fact, I was able to get together with other rabbis, and we made a conscious decision to rebel against the Conservatives who believed in the literal interpretation of the Torah,” Doctor Adler explained.